May 9, 1888.] 



Garden and Forest 



131 



Ten years after a place has been planted on the latter princi- 

 ple no two out of a hundred of its trees may yet have begun 

 to grow into grouping connection one with another. None 

 will, at best, be more than promising " specimens." All will 

 not be that, for, through ice storms, cyclonic gusts, strokes of 

 lightning, borers, climbing boys, runaway wagons, lingering 

 diseases or the development of a cramped or a straggling 

 habit of growth, some will be unpromising. The place will 

 not have upon it a hundredth part of the whole body of 

 foliage which, with a continued flourishing condition of all 

 its trees, is to be eventually expected, for after ten years the 

 bulk of foliage carried by most of our trees increases annually, 

 for many years, at a very rapidly advancing rate. In a single 

 year the leafage of a tree, under favorable circumstances, may 

 double. If there have been disturbing circumstances in the 

 landscape beyond the bounds of the property, such as may be 

 caused by a rural cemetery or a fantastic villa with flaunting 

 flower beds and iron fountains and statuary, they will not yet 

 have been "planted out." Under these circumstances it is 

 not improbable that those living on the place will have become 

 impatient of its public, imfurnislied and hobbledehoy char- 

 acter, and to get the better of it will fill in supplementary 

 plantings, which will be quite as unfavorable to the realization 

 of the design of the primary planting as the neglect of proper 

 thinnings of a dense planting would have been. 



To appreciate the liability of such a result one should have 

 in mind what great blank spaces must be left lietwoen sapling 

 trees if it is intended to give them room for anything like their 

 possible full develo[iment. Two continuously flourishing 

 Elms will eventually cross branches if planted a hundred feet 

 apart. I have paced the shadow of one of a group of Oaks at 

 noon-day which was a hundred and forty feet across. 



As a lialiility to the miscarriage of a design in one way or 

 the other can by no means be fully guarded against, the con-' 

 elusion seems reasonaljle that a landscape artist no more than 

 any other should be asked to school himself to have only 

 standards in view that he can be sure will be appreciated and 

 sustained by his clients and the successors of his clients. Per- 

 haps the better "moral" is that in planting, as in all other 

 operations of landscape gardening, what is the best way of 

 proceeding is a question of time, place and circumstance. 

 There should be no stereotyped work. 



The subject cannot be dismissed without another word of 

 caution. 



In contending with the superstition that prevents the due 

 thinning of plantations, I have found that the impression had 

 sometimes been left on the minds of the inexperienced that 

 under no circumstances is it good practice to plant trees so that 

 when full grown their branches are at any point likely to meet 

 and interlock. Every one who goes to Nature for instruction 

 knows how she laughs at such a precept. As an example, 

 consider a very common case in any region of old farms, 

 where trees are seen that have grown from seedlings within a 

 space of perhaps twenty feet on each side of a former fence. 

 In a distance of fifty yards measured along the fence line 

 there will be numbers of large trees, the trunks of which do 

 not stand on an average more than ten feet apart. Tlieir 

 roots and branches spreading outwardly from the central line, 

 these trees have had, on the whole, no serious lack of air, 

 light or food, and their heads have gTown into an unbroken 

 body which could have been made more beautiful, if liy any 

 course of treatment, most assuredly not either by sparser 

 planting or more trenchant thinning. 



As to shrubs, no one can have failed to notice the value in 

 landscape of low bodies of foliage of much denser growth than 

 it is customary to have in view in any pleasure plantations. 

 There will have been seen, for instance, in England, neglected 

 hedges, chiefly of Hawthorn, that, a hundred years or more 

 after planting, have spread into masses several yards in 

 breadth. I have come upon such close about London as well 

 as in remote rural districts, and I have never seen anything in 

 park or garden more beautiful. In our South-western States 

 there are to be seen similar, but broader, and, if possible, yet 

 more admirable bodies of Cherokee Roses, with a sprinkling of 

 other things, that the smallest bird could not make his way 

 through ; on our northern Atlantic coast broad patches of 

 Bayberry, with stems considerably more than a hundred 

 to the square yard; on the high Sierras acres of the Oolden 

 Chestnut equally dense; on the top of a North Carolina 

 mountain, half a mile square, of Catawba Rhododendron 

 growing so closely that the ground beneath it is as bare as 

 if it had just been plowed, harrowed and rolled. No one 

 seeing it can be disposed to ask if it would not be better 

 worth seeing if it had been planted more scatteringly or 

 been thinned out as often as branches came to interlock 

 or to be l)ent u|>ward. 



There are many situations where trees would shut off a 

 prospect, in which plantations of the character thus indicated 

 would make a much better, overlookable foreground than 

 shrubs standing in small groups and singly upon a body of 

 turf kept bv a lawn-mower. 



Biookline, is'lh April, 18SS. 



F. L. Olmsted. 



To the Editor of Garden and Forest : 



Sir. — I believe in American trees for American planting, as a 

 rule. But our Apples, Apricots, Peaches, Pears, and most of our 

 Plums, have come from other continents. And there is a nut 

 tree which I have seen growing on the mountain sides and 

 plateaus of the continent of Europe, as well as in Corsica and 

 Sardinia, which furnishes an important article of subsistence 

 to millions of people. I refer to the so-called Spanish Chest- 

 nut. The nut is ground into flour and made into liread, and 

 the Hon. S. S. Cox, in his recent " Search for Winter Sun- 

 beams," declares that the mountaineers of Corsica prepare 

 their Chestnuts for the table in twenty different ways. Our . 

 native Chestnut flourishes from New England to Georgia, but 

 its best nuts are comparatively little things. Why can we not 

 grow the Spanish Chestnut as well as we have grown French 

 Pears ? On Washington Heights, Manhattan Island, I have 

 picked half a peck of these nuts that had dropped from a tree 

 twenty years after the seed was planted, and these nuts were 

 as good as imported ones in every way. Farther North the 

 summers may be too short to ripen the nuts before frost, but 

 from the latitude of New York southward we might hope for 

 a crop as certain as from our own trees. On soils where om- 

 native Chestnut flourishes an orchard of Spanish Chestnuts 

 would be in bearing fifteen years from seed, and the crop 

 would be much more valuable than the wheat crop, and would 

 increase in value for many years. In California the so-called 

 English Walnut, the Almond, and the Olive, have been intro- 

 duced with profit. Would it not be wortli while to try this 

 European Chestnut on our own coast .' 



East Orange, N. J. G.B. \V. 



[The cultivation of the Chestnut is an important an<l 

 profitable industry in most of the countries of Southern 

 Europe, and for centuries the improvement of the fruit, 

 through careful selection, has been going on. The wild 

 forms of the Old World Chestnut produce fruit no larger 

 than our American Chestnuts, although selection and cul- 

 tivation has now developed varieties three or four times 

 as large. 



This fact suggests the possibility of increasing by selec- 

 tion and cultivation the size of the fruit of the American 

 Chestnut, which greatly e.xxels all European varieties in 

 sweetness and flavor, a possibility which should attract 

 the attention of American horticulturists, who, in the im- 

 provement of our Chestnut, have an opportunity to increase 

 the agricultural resources and the food supply of the 

 Atlantic States. The Spanish Chestnut has hardly been 

 sufficiently tested yet in any part of this country to justify 

 its general introduction as an orchard tree. It is not 

 very hardy at the North and often suffers in severe win- 

 ters; in Virginia and in the more Southern Atlantic States, 

 howe\'er, it should succeed as well as in Northern Italy ; 

 and this tree should certainly be more generally tested 

 there than it has been heretofore. The Japanese form of 

 the Chestnut promises to become a valuable addition to 

 our ornamental, and, possibly, to our orchard trees. It 

 is hardier than the European varieties, and although the 

 fruit is smaller, it is sweeter and better flavored. The 

 best varieties of the Spanish Chestnut can only be propa- 

 gated by grafting, as seedlings are apt to revert to the 

 wild form. We shall be glad to learn of 'the experience 

 of our readers in the Middle and Southern States with 

 this tree. — Ed.] 



Recent Publications. 



The Illusiraied Dictionary of Gardening; A Practical and 

 Scientific E>icyclopcedia of Horticulture for Gardeners and 

 Botanists. Edited by George Nicholson. London ; and in 

 New York by Orange Judd & Co., 1887-88. 



Three volumes of this work have now appeared, and the 

 fourth and last may be expected in a few weeks. The earliest, 

 and still the most famous. Dictionary of Gardening, is that 

 written bv Phillip Miller. It was publislied in London in 17.-51. 



